DAVID ALLEN: T.S. Eliot may have found Claremont the chaste land

CLAREMONT GETS notable visitors each year, famous names who come to speak at the colleges and stay overnight, if they can bear to awaken in the 909 rather than L.A.

Then there was highbrow poet T.S. Eliot, a future Nobel laureate who hung around town for a week and a half. His visit was not only lengthy but mysterious.

He was here to visit a female professor at Scripps College, a woman whose relationship with the great poet is still unclear to scholars.

(Well, we know she wasn't his mother. Past that, it gets a little murky.)

I did some research on this visit last spring at Scripps' Denison Library. Since Eliot's visit occurred during Christmas break 80 years ago, now is as good a time as any to dredge up the details. It's a curious tale.

Emily Hale and Eliot, a St. Louis native, had met in Boston in 1913. They hit it off and some biographers think they had a love affair. The next year Eliot departed for Oxford University, where in early 1915 he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood after a short courtship.

The marriage went poorly and she developed mental problems that saw her in and out of sanitariums.

In 1927, Hale wrote to Eliot to renew their friendship. They began exchanging letters frequently. She evidently functioned as a muse for him, but he was racked by guilt, shame and other poet-type hangups.

"Exactly what their relationship was, no one knows. There is speculation that it was quite chaste," said Judy Harvey Sahak, Denison's librarian, who has studied Eliot's visit.

In 1932 Hale joined the Scripps faculty, where she taught drama. Her colleagues learned of her friendship with Eliot, "as she spoke of him quite often, always as `Tom,' and was obviously much in touch with him, and wore a ring that he had given her," then-faculty member Lorraine Havens recalled in 1982.

Hmm. "Tom" this, "Tom" that, and here's a ring he gave me. Behavior like that inspires gossip, but people contacted 50 years later by an L.A. Times writer for their reminiscences kept their speculations private.

An unconventional sort, Hale had appeared in plays in Boston, to the dismay of her proper family, and during some student visits to her home wore a black silk dressing gown embroidered with Chinese dragons.

"She was a vivid, interesting person who attracted a large following of stage-struck girls. I was one of them," wrote Laurabel Neville Hume.

Adding to her appeal, letters arrived weekly "in blue envelopes with British postage from the great poet," Hume said, and Hale had "a leather folder in her room with two pictures of Mr. Eliot, autographed to her."

(Hale in 1947 donated signed books and Eliot manuscripts to Scripps. More about their correspondence later.)

In late 1932, Eliot traveled from England to Boston to lecture. Under the logic that Boston was halfway to Claremont, Hale invited him west for a visit. Eliot accepted. Maybe he wanted to compare Southern California to his poem "The Waste Land."

Still, a visit to her home turf? Hmm.

Given the decorum of the times, it's difficult to know what to make of the visit's motivation.

"Although Eliot was, at the time, married...his relationship with Hale was undoubtedly intense and potentially if not actually romantic - his visit was to her," student Sam Cross wrote in 2005, compiling correspondence and other materials related to the Claremont visit.

On Dec. 27, 1932, Eliot arrived via train at the Santa Fe depot (still in use) in Claremont. It's lucky he didn't disembark in Pomona and wonder where the college was.

Hale and Paul Havens, a professor with a car, picked him up.

"My husband," Lorraine Havens remembered, "loved to tell how he greeted the famous poet at 6:20 a.m. as he descended unshaven from the Santa Fe railway car."

They drove to the home of Mary Eyre, a Scripps professor who lived at 1132 N. College Ave. (home still standing), which had been lent to him for his stay.

(Oh, if only he had been driven to the home of Jane Eyre! He might have competed with Mr. Rochester for Jane's affections, with Emily Hale as a fourth member of the love quadrangle. But I digress.)

Eliot's only official duty while in town was to give a lecture on nonsense poet Edward Lear at Scripps' Balch Hall on Jan. 5, 1933. He also gave a talk at UCLA.

Student Marie McSpadden arranged one or more sailing excursions around Balboa Island for Eliot and Hale, "primarily so that they could have uninterrupted time together," she recalled in 1982.

Hale, Eliot and the Havenses attended the Episcopal Church in Upland one Sunday.

He visited various faculty homes for tea and chatter, among them that of Harold Davis, a Pomona College English professor (612 W. 10th St.), and the Havenses (235 E. Ninth St., no longer standing).

At the latter Eliot discussed Donne, Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden and ate watercress and cucumber sandwiches.

Two notable tidbits from that visit: 1) Mrs. Havens took the poet into another room to show off her infant daughter, just so the tyke could one day say she met T.S. Eliot, and 2) he drank 14 cups of tea, no doubt necessitating a visit to a different room.

"Those who met Eliot describe him as shy, yet charming; formal and reserved, but quite courteous," wrote Kay Koeninger in the Times, who in 1982 corresponded with former students and faculty for her story.

Eliot's full itinerary is unknown, and no photos exist in the college archives. We don't know what he thought of Claremont or of Southern California, nor how he spent his New Year's Eve. (Did he, like his character J. Alfred Prufrock, dare to eat a peach?)

"We don't know what he saw in Claremont. He probably walked down to the Village, whatever the Village consisted of at this point," the library's Sahak said.

I picture Eliot inviting Hale for a walk around the Village: "Let us go then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table;/Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets..."

Eliot left Claremont around Jan. 6, 1933, returning to Harvard to continue his lecture series. That summer he returned to England and legally separated from his wife.

Hale visited him that summer and returned to Claremont with a present from "Tom," in the form of "a large dog," Lorraine Havens said. Perhaps not what Hale was hoping for.

Hale left Scripps in 1934 and spent a year in Europe, meeting Virginia Woolf, but left without any commitment from Eliot. She returned to her native Boston and taught at Smith College. She sank into a depression alarming enough for Eliot to visit, but he returned to England without her.

Eliot's wife died in a mental institution in 1947, freeing him to marry Hale if he chose after two decades of correspondence and visits.

Hale wrote to a friend that she met with Eliot two or three times "to try to sift the situation as thoroughly as possible," but she came to the conclusion his love for her wasn't "in the way usual to men less gifted," although she couldn't bring herself to give up hope.

Ten years later, Eliot married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, an admirer 38 years his junior. Upon learning the news, Hale had a breakdown and was hospitalized.

Between 1927 and 1957, Eliot had written Hale an astonishing 1,000 letters. Sahak's view is that Eliot didn't take Hale seriously as a love interest but put her "on a pedestal" as a feminine ideal.

Similarly, in a review of Lyndall Gordon's 1988 Eliot biography "Eliot's New Life," Denis Donoghue wrote in the New York Times:

"If Eliot was ever in love with Emily Hale, it was in some ethereal and spectral sense, a love beyond desire. It is hard to resist the suspicion that he was morally obtuse: he kept Emily Hale hanging about, full of expectation, as if she had nothing better to do than to maintain his symbolism; he certainly went far toward destroying her life."

After Eliot's marriage, Hale went into seclusion and died in 1969. Eliot died in 1965.

Valerie devoted almost 50 years to guarding and promoting her husband's legacy before her death only this Nov. 9 at age 86.

What of the Eliot-Hale correspondence? He is said to have burned her letters after his second marriage - if Hale wrote 1,000 letters back, the Eliots didn't need to buy firewood that winter - but his letters survive.

Hale donated them to Princeton under the proviso they not be seen until Jan. 1, 2020.

In seven years, then, we'll get T.S. Eliot's side of the relationship - and, a bit less momentously, we might learn what he thought of Claremont.